Housing recovery prediction: Next year - Santa Cruz Sentinel
June 30, 2008
It’s time once again to play the game - when is the housing market going to recover? The Santa Cruz Sentinel is taking another stab at it:
[From Housing recovery prediction: Next year - Santa Cruz Sentinel]
Don’t expect the housing market to recover this year.
Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist for the California Association of Realtors, forecasts a turnaround next spring.
Just thought I’d pass that along. I had a bunch more stuff I wanted to talk about, but it’s 11:33 PM and I still have lots more “real” work to do tonight before hitting the hay and gettin’ back at it tomorrow morning bright and early.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 11:34pm
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Home sales see first monthly gain in 6 months
May 21, 2008
I’m drinking my coffee and seeing what’s new in the world via my handy RSS Reader NetNewsWire, and I came across this interesting article on SFGate.com:
The Bay Area housing market displayed its first positive sign in months as the volume of April sales rose by its highest percentage in at least 20 years. Real estate experts, however, warned that the trough of the real estate downturn still could lie ahead.
Yeah, I know, it’s the Bay Area, not Santa Cruz - but what happened in Santa Cruz mirrored what happened in the bay area - namely, sales were up sharply, as reported in the Santa Cruz Sentinel in their article on Santa Cruz April 2008 home sales on May 14. They didn’t quote me in that article, sniff, although the reporter, Jondi Gumz, did send me an e-mail asking me to weigh in, I guess I replied too late in the day or my comments weren’t pithy enough - or both.
What it all means is that it looks like we are getting near the bottom. We are probably not be there yet - except in Watsonville, where we definitely are at the bottom. Unless there’s a big fat recession with big job loss, which of course would probably signal a deepening spiral further downwards. I think 2008 is going to turn out to be the Year to Buy in Santa Cruz. Don’t let it pass you by.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 8:59am
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That Keller Williams Kool-Aid
May 13, 2008
I recently completed a transaction as the buyer’s agent with an agent for Keller Williams. It was a short sale, and yes, it dragged on for months - we got into contract in January, and closed in late April. After all was said and done, the seller’s agent and I agreed to meet for coffee and to exchange some final documents and so I could get the key to pass on to my buyers.
You may not be aware of this, but Keller Williams agents are kind of messianic about their company. They love it over there. A few months back during the Watsonville REO tour that we had, I had met another KW agent, and she spoke in glowing terms of her company, and in particular about this training that they had, which was open to agents from any brokerage, not just Keller Williams.
So when I was sitting down for coffee with the seller’s agent, I started talking to her about Keller Williams and the training that they provide. Not surprisingly, she was very enthusiastic and encouraged me to come on down for the next training session they were putting on. I agreed to do so, and so yesterday I sat through 2.5 hours of training on getting listings, put on by a very able and passionate trainer.
As promised, the training was excellent. Honestly, probably better than any real estate training I have been to. There’s one thing in particular I took away from that training, which I want to share with you. If you are a seller, please sit down, pour yourself a nice tall glass of kool-aid, and listen to this.
Keller Williams has a pretty good pricing strategy. It’s simple, and it goes like this: price your home below “market price.” A good bit below. Like, 10% below. Then, market the heck out of it and wait 21 days before taking offers. The buyers will beat a path to your door so quick it will make the neighbors upset because obviously, you’re having one heck of a party and they didn’t get invited.
A home which is priced clearly below market value will attract multiple offers. There is good example of this every day, with these REO properties. The banks price these things low. They price them to sell. And they do, quickly, and usually with multiple offers. It is very common for these properties to sell for over asking price, often by 10%.
This pricing strategy is an excellent one, especially in a market like today’s. In an appreciating seller’s market, it’s not such a bad thing to over-price your property by 10% - sooner or later, the market will catch up to you, and you’ll probably end up getting that extra 10% if you wait long enough. However, when you are in a declining market, if you do not sell your home quickly, the market will probably pass you right on by.
In a declining market, people don’t want to buy for fair market price, because the market price is dropping, and next month, it’s going to be worth less than it was the month before. You need to list your property under fair market price, attract multiple offers, and sell it for the most the market is willing to pay for at the moment.
That’s a winning strategy, and it’s working spectacularly for the banks selling their foreclosure properties, and it is also working for sellers who price their homes to sell.
I’m going back to Keller Williams on Wednesday for another training. Not sure what it’s about. And yes, I know, it’s all a trap. They want to seduce you into signing up with them by providing world-class training gratis and showing you that there’s a better way to sell Real Estate. I have no intention of leaving Thunderbird Real Estate at the moment - I’ve long thought that my next step after Thunderbird would be to open my own brokerage (I’m a licensed real estate broker, after all). But if one day you see me sportin’ a mustache and talking feverishly about how great KW is, you’ll know how it all began.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 8:28am
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Santa Cruz Real Estate Sales Data - April 2008
May 10, 2008
Well, the numbers are in, and we’re looking better. For those of you who are really interested in knowing what’s going on with real estate sales in Santa Cruz county, I want to remind you that I have a great page on my web site that gives you all kinds of ways to look at Santa Cruz Real Estate Sales Data. Also, I offer a monthly Santa Cruz Real Estate newsletter which offers an analysis of what the numbers mean, and this month’s edition just hit the inboxes of subscribers.
OK, maybe the numbers aren’t grrrrrrrreat! like our friend Tony the Tiger would say. But they’re certainly better than what we’ve seen lately. What’s the scoop? For Santa Cruz county as a whole, sales and prices of single-family homes rebounded nicely in April compared to March. County-wide, there were 103 sales in April ‘08, compared to just 70 in March ‘08. Also, the median price of those homes rose 6.1% from March.
Comparing one month to the month before it isn’t a terribly useful exercise, however. After all, we are approaching the peak selling season, so it’s no surprise that sales numbers are up. However, it’s a very good thing that sales numbers aren’t down - that would be most unwelcome news.
It is, perhaps, more interesting to compare April ‘08 to April ‘07 - what do we see there? There, we see that the median price (again, county-wide) of single-family residences is down 11.8%, and in April last year, 132 homes were sold - so about 25% fewer homes were sold this April. The numbers are considerably worse for condos, but so few condos were sold (just 19 county wide) that it’s difficult to really gauge what’s going on in that market price-wise.
One thing I’d like to point out here is what’s happening in Watsonville. There is an enormous amount of pending home sales in Watsonville - homes that are under contract, but the sales have yet to close. Many/most of these homes are foreclosure properties - there are some staggering bargains to be had. It will be interesting to see what happens to the sales numbers and median prices when these sales close.
I really encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter. I’ve got an interesting article in there this month about the problem with the foreclosure numbers - things are perhaps not so bad as they seem. Of course, if you are one of the many unfortunate homeowners contributing to the swelling statistics of foreclosure numbers, if things get really bad, you can always just walk away.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 8:30am
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Santa Cruz Real Estate Market Data - Revisited and Revamped!
April 14, 2008
I can’t tell you how many times a day people write to me and call me just begging to know the latest real estate sales data for Santa Cruz county. It happens so often that some days, it feels like all I do is field calls about how many condos sold in the San Lorenzo Valley in Q1 ‘08.
OK, I’m being facetious. In fact, that hardly ever happens. More often than not, when people call me out of the blue it’s because they either a) want money or b) want to buy a house, not necessarily in that order.
The fact is, though, that many people in our beautiful area do, from time to time, have more than a passing interest in the real estate sales data in the Santa Cruz area. And for those of you who do, I have something I’d like to show you.
In order to legitimately call SantaCruzHomeBroker.com the best site on the internet for information about Santa Cruz Real Estate, I feel that it’s important to have as much information about the local real estate market as possible. For this reason, I have had for some time a set of pages with sales data.
I’ll come clean. I don’t laboriously compile this data and make it available for you. That’s what Gary Ganges does, and he’s very good at it. Instead, I pay a small company who does it for me, and they do a far better job than I could ever do. What I do is I integrate that sales data into my web site. And, this nice small company has recently upgraded their offering considerably. Of course, they have also upgraded their pricing considerably as well - not too happy about that part, but truth be told, I spare no expense to bring you the best Santa Cruz Real Estate web site in creation.
From the looks of it, though, the upgrades appear to be worth every penny - nice and heavy on the use of Flash, so it must be good! Check it out:
Santa Cruz Real Estate Market Data
Spend a few minutes checking it out. One that I’d like to highlight is that you can now set up the system to send you your own custom market data report. You just configure the report how you want it - you choose the county, city, property type, date range, etc. - and then click “View Report.” Next, you can click “Save Report.” You will need to create an account to save your report and have it sent to you - but don’t worry that I’ll spam you mercilessly to death after that, because I won’t.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 7:04pm
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